Apocalypse Now Poster

For these posters, I attempted to use a modernist style, in line with Saul Bass’ design process. To do so, I used a minimal colour palette, geometric shapes and simple sans serif type, laid out rationally at the bottom. Saul Bass’ modernist posters always use a simple graphic image as a symbolic representation of the movie, The main themes of Apocalypse now are based upon simply representing the horror and chaos of the Vietnam War, this is further emphasised by looking at it through the eyes of the American troops, many of whom are just teenagers. And this is where we see the prevailing themes of the movie - rock and roll music, drugs and 70’s western culture, clashing violently with with the sheer horror of war. A scene which rather symbolically and visually represents this, is when one of the characters, who’s dancing around on the boat having just taken LSD, lets off a pink smoke flare. I visualised this through a winding pink shape going up the page, encircling the sun at the top, this also visually references the long river the central characters travel up in the movie.